Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

--  Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau understood and taught so much about work -- and life. We can only hope to comprehend and practice his lessons as thoroughly.

For instance,

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.

Or this:

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

Or this:

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Or this:

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.